Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Guest: Vicki Stiefel, co-author of 10 Secrets of the Laidback Knitter. She wrote this book with Lisa Souza and the whole premise is to help knitters experience more joy from their knitting. The authors wanted this book to be inclusive to everyone. Make sure you check it out!

Last show we talked about making the center back cable panel, and now that that’s done, we’re ready to pick up stitches!

Now, technically, the cable could be oriented either with the cast on edge at the neck or at the bottom hem. But I put it at the top neck so it’ll look more like the cables you’re about to do from the shoulders down. This is why you’re doing the right half of the body even though it says you’re picking up on the left edge of the cable panel. By “left edge” I mean the edge that’s at the end of a RS row. After working your last row, your yarn and needles should be poised to start working here, anyway.

When I’m picking up stitches in a bulky yarn like this, I like to go into the edge stitch instead of beyond it so you don’t have a thick seam on the WS. But you can do it whichever way you’re most comfortable. You have to pick up 50 sts in 86 rows here, which is somewhere close to 3 sts for every 4 rows, not exact, but you don’t want to have to cram sts in at the very ends, and I find that the cables can compact the rows a little more than Stockinette.

So, to pick up stitches, hold the cable panel firmly in your left hand, and with your right-hand needle, go into the selvedge stitch, from front to back, wrap your yarn like for a normal knit stitch, and draw the loop through the fabric. You’re essentially treating the edge of your cable panel like it’s a row of stitches on a needle. And if you’re still having trouble, definitely google it, there are lots of videos for you to be able to see it.

Once you’re done picking up those 50 sts, you’re going to cast on 44. How do you do that? Well, there are a few different methods you can use here, but the important thing is to use a cast on that only uses one strand of yarn, not 2 like the long-tail method. I recommend using the backwards loop cast on here, sometimes called an “e wrap” because it looks like a lower case letter ‘e’. I recommend it because it’s easy, it’s somewhat stable, it’s easy to pick up from, which you’ll be doing later, and if you look closely at your long-tail cast on, you’ll see that it’s actually the same as a backwards loop cast on with one row of knitting already built into it. So there’s some symmetry if you use it here.

Art & Barbara purchased a large mill end lot of 1300 YPP Rayon Chenille. They then had it dyed and it became one of the first of the WEBS yarns. It was the first time they had repeatable colorways. They were also able to take advantage of mills in the US, which unfortunately, don’t exist anymore.

Barbara & Art used to drive around looking for mills and finding them by looking for water towers. Art made lots of contacts, and now that everything is more precise with computers, mill ends don’t really exist.

Next week – What happens when Art retires his “regular” job.

Also next week, we’ll be LIVE at our Tent Sale, so local customers can catch us on WHMP. The podcast version will go up later than usual.